The shooting death of Renee Good on Wednesday at first may have seemed like a distant matter to us in Hampton Roads. A tragic act of violence playing out in a faraway city would ordinarily be a local trauma with little bearing on residents here.
It was later reported that the woman killed in Minneapolis attended Old Dominion University, graduating in 2020, though that shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter it was here she was an award-winning poet, here she began her family and here where she pursued her dreams.
But it does.
It drives home the fact that this happened in Minneapolis, but it could have been Norfolk or Hampton or Newport News. It could have been any of us behind the wheel of that SUV as federal officers swarmed our neighborhood. It could have any of us who had our lives taken amid an overzealous immigration campaign that is tearing our country apart.
Good’s killing matters to every community in Hampton Roads and across Virginia. It matters because the wife and mother shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent could have been anyone.
And it matters even more because of the depraved attempt by Trump administration officials, up to and including the president of the United States, to paint Good as an attacker instead of victim. They rushed to denigrate her as a trained domestic terrorist, without a shred of evidence, rather than a woman confronted in her community by masked, armed men shouting contradictory commands at her.
Forensic analysis by multiple news organizations, using the numerous videos of the shooting, all came to the same conclusions: Good was given conflicting instructions by several officers — who told her to stop, to move and to exit her vehicle — and the ICE agent who shot her was never in harm’s way when she complied with the order to drive away.
Contrary to what President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and some Republican members of Congress have subsequently claimed, this wasn’t a radicalized leftist trying to harm law enforcement officers. Quite the opposite. And their framing requires the public to believe a fiction that disintegrates in the face of all available evidence.
They know the reckless, avoidable shooting of a woman on Wednesday afternoon reveals to every American the casual violence endemic to the yearlong emphasis on aggressive immigration enforcement.
Numerous times, the narratives pushed by Homeland Security, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have crumbled under the lightest scrutiny. Officials have scoffed at oversight and been chastised by federal judges for lying, for threatening observers and journalists, for using excessive force and for recklessly endangering the lives of the public.
People are dead as a result. Since the crackdown began, The New York Times reports, immigration officers have fired on at least 10 people in five states and Washington, D.C., killing two. A man in Norfolk died when he was struck by a car on I-264 fleeing federal agents, one of several to lose their lives in that way. At least 32 people have died in federal custody following arrests by immigration officers.
Large numbers of Americans increasingly oppose these actions. December polling by Pew Research Center found the public in opposition to the administration’s handling of immigration enforcement by a 50-39 margin. Support for ICE and CBP is eroding. People know that none of this makes our country safer.
That’s almost certainly why administration officials rushed to smear Good and why local and state authorities have been cut out of the FBI investigation into her killing. Even Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan, no radical leftist, said it was important to “let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation.”
This simply cannot continue. Accountability is needed. Congress and the courts must act to rein in the lawlessness and cruelty unfolding in communities across this nation.
Good’s death must be a turning point, because it matters to all of us.
